Feb 24

Feb 24 My Sustainable Community - Year 9 Project wins The Institute of Engineering and Technology Competition

Science, Secondary, Writing, Environment

This year our year 9 students worked as a collaborative team to enter The Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) 150: My Sustainable Community Competition. The project involved a range of interdisciplinary skills, including report writing, research, critical and creative thinking, communication and collaboration skills, developing and challenging our learners. By utilising and developing these skills the students have tackled one of the biggest challenges we face today, looking at how to build a sustainable community.

The project was entered into the large group category for 11-14 year old students and won the competition. Here is some feedback from our Judges -

'A fantastic example of team work and project planning ensuring each person had a role and responsibility towards the final design. The research conducted by the team allowed them to take real life examples of great sustainability solutions from around the globe but also included “out of the box” thinking for fuelling the train.'

Below is the awards video from IET, their introduction to the report and a link to the full report. Congratulations to all the students involved.

Introduction

This school year, our class has entered the EESW IET 150 My Sustainable Community Challenge, which is a competition between schools to design the best and most sustainable community that contains approximately 150 houses. We decided to enter the competition, because we are concerned about our futures, and we would like to play our part in coming up with an idea for future, sustainable communities.

At our school, Landmark International School, we all feel part of a small community ourselves. We are very fond of, and some would say, protective over the small communities, as we are so fortunate to be a part of one. This is another reason why designing a small community resonated with us.

Every Friday morning, we have a STEM lesson, and we decided that these sessions would be perfect to work on the project. We thought that it would be good to look at the community as a whole, and that it would be better to work on the project as a class instead of smaller separate groups each doing their own project. This is because there are many aspects to a sustainable community, and with everybody working together, tackling all the different parts of the project would be much easier. We also agreed on this because it is the first time we have worked as a whole class of 16 on a project and this has given us new challenges.